John Wesley Hardin

John Wesley Hardin grew up the son of a Methodist preacher in Texas and killed his first man at 15, by his own account in self-defense against a former slave during the chaos of Reconstruction, and spent the next two decades compiling a body count he himself claimed at around 40 — a figure historians have never been able to confirm or fully disprove. He fought, gambled, and fled across Texas, Kansas, and Alabama, evading posses, state police, and at least one Texas Ranger detachment sent specifically to bring him in.

Texas Rangers finally caught Hardin on a train in Pensacola, Florida, in 1877 through an informant's tip, and a court sentenced him to 25 years for a Comanche County killing. Prison reformed him on paper: he studied law by correspondence course, was ordained a Sunday school superintendent, and won release in 1894 after 17 years, pardoned partly on the strength of a legal brief he had written himself. He passed the Texas bar and opened a practice in El Paso the following year, a convicted killer representing clients in the same courthouses that had once tried to hang him.

El Paso did not let him reinvent himself for long. Hardin drank heavily, feuded publicly with the local constable John Selman over a client dispute, and on August 19, 1895, was shot in the back of the head while rolling dice at the bar of the Acme Saloon. He was 42. Selman was acquitted, claiming Hardin had drawn first, though Hardin was shot from behind and never got the chance. His memoir, finished just before his death, insisted he had never killed a man who did not have it coming.